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Bloomberg for Prime Minister!

The key selling point about Clegg is … that he is the “anti-politics” candidate. But this is entirely bogus. From his enthusiasm for deeper integration within the EU, to his lack of concern over mass immigration, to his loopy greenery and to his loyalty to the conventional pieties of poltical correctness, Clegg is a stereotypical representative of the liberal establishment that is the very essence of “politics as usual.” He is a perfect mandarin of the political class that has done so much to turn British voters off politics (and has done so much to wreck the country while it was at it).

In a way, the Clegg bubble in Britain looks a bit like the fulfillment, across the pond, of a recurring fantasy harbored by well-intentioned American elites, in which a “plague on both your houses” political moment provides an opening, not for a rabble-rouser like Huey Long or George Wallace or even Ross Perot, but for a high-minded third-party candidate who happens to perfectly embody the views and biases of the American establishment. Someone like, oh, Michael Bloomberg, who’s long been the white knight of choice for people who pine for the chance to vote a free-trading deficit-cutting open-borders eco-friendly social liberal into office, but who are too uncomfortable with party labels and party politics to just call themselves Clinton Democrats and have done with it.

In America, the Bloomberg fantasy really is just a fantasy, for reasons that Ben Smith explained in a piece puncturing the New York mayor’s White House ambitions back in 2006. But in Great Britain, Nick Clegg is doing a pretty good imitation of a Bloomberg-for-president campaign — and it seems to be working.

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About

Ross Douthat joined The New York Times as an Op-Ed columnist in April 2009. Previously, he was a senior editor at the Atlantic and a blogger for theatlantic.com. He is the author of "Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class" (Hyperion, 2005) and the co-author, with Reihan Salam, of "Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream" (Doubleday, 2008). He is the film critic for National Review.